A temporal hand gesture recognition system based on hog and motion trajectory

A real-time, rapid and robust gesture recognition system is usually hindered by difficulty of hand localization and complexity of hand gesture modeling, especially under complex background. For eliminating these obstacles, in this paper, we propose a method using histograms of oriented gradients features (HOG) and motion trajectory information for temporal hand gesture recognition in natural environment. We firstly localize hand in video stream based on hand detection by HOG and support vector machine algorithm (SVM). After hand localization, the motion trajectory information of consecutive hand gesture is extracted and a database of standard gestures is built. Finally, the Mahalanobis distance between input gesture and database is computed for recognition. As the experimental results shown, our method exhibits a good performance in real-time test.